'Footnote' effectively explores ambition, family dynamics

'Footnote' effectively explores ambition, family dynamics

"Footnote" speaks volumes. Intensely specific in story yet wide-ranging in themes, with a tone that turns on a dime from comic absurdity to close to tragedy, this is brainy, bravura filmmaking of the highest level, a motion picture that is as difficult to pigeonhole as it is a pleasure to enjoy.

The fourth work by writer-director Joseph Cedar, Israel's most accomplished filmmaker, "Footnote" opens Friday for a one-week engagement at Landmark's La Jolla Village Cinemas.

The film has been a critic's darling. It took the screenplay award at Cannes, won nine Israeli Oscars (including picture, script and direction for Cedar, plus a pair of acting awards) and, like Cedar's last film, 2007's very different "Beaufort," was one of the five nominees for the foreign-language film Oscar. All despite subject matter that could not sound more unlikely and even obscure.

Set in the spirited precincts of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, "Footnote" deals with the implacable rivalry between two scholars of the Talmud, the complex and sacred key text of the Jewish religious tradition. These competitive scholars, the misanthropic Eliezer (Shlomo Bar Aba) and the gregarious Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), happen to be the Shkolniks, father and son.

"Talmud is known for being the smallest and toughest department at the university," filmmaker Cedar, whose own father is a celebrated Hebrew U. scientist, said at Cannes. "These are people who have dedicated their lives to something esoteric, and they've done it with the drive of Julius Caesar."

It is Cedar's particular gift to have found a way to make the infighting and the rivalries of wide interest in and of itself and also one capable of speaking easily to larger issues. "Footnote's" nominally miniature canvas turns out to encompass with casual grace such themes as the price of ambition, the need for recognition and the perhaps inevitable tension between fathers and sons.

These conflicts are not all that make "Footnote" so stimulating. The inventive, playfully cinematic ways Cedar presents the drama ---- like using unspooling microfilm as a recurring visual theme ---- are essential in keeping us involved.

The film's opening segments, daringly set to music reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann's Alfred Hitchcock thriller scores (Amit Poznansky did the music), skillfully present many of the plot elements that will play out unexpectedly as the story progresses.

After the words "The most difficult day in the life of Professor Shkolnik" appear on the screen, we immediately see an older academic-looking man, presumably the individual in question, and a voice-over listing extensive and impressive professorial credits: international recognition, nine books written, dozens of papers, the respect of his peers, etc.

Only gradually does it fully register that, though it is father Eliezer Shkolnik we are looking at, the voice is extolling the virtues of his son Uriel, and it is the father's difficult day because seeing that son getting inducted into the Israeli National Academy of Science ---- an honor he himself has not received ---- is eating him alive. It's simply the first of many of "Footnote's" delicious reverses.